Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos every
week on all aspects of the past. Today on History Calling, we’re looking at one of my favourite
portraits of Elizabeth I, which you see here. This is one of the few images of her before she
became Queen and unlike so many other pictures of her, it’s not a copy of a lost original, or
a paint-by-numbers publicity image created from a standard template – it’s the real deal. A picture
painted from life while Elizabeth was still just a girl. Using original sources dating back to
the 16th century, I’m going to take you through its almost 500 year history, from its creation,
to its inheritance by multiple generations of the royal family, to what happened to it when Charles
I’s art collection (of which the painting was just one small part) was seized, broken up and sold by
Oliver Cromwell after the King’s execution in 1649. We’ll see what happened to it after the
Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and learn how it may have escaped one of the greatest fires to
ever hit a royal palace in 1698. I’ll also explain what Elizabeth’s clothing, posture and props
tell us about her, why some believe her necklace was inherited from her mother, Anne Boleyn
and reveal what has ultimately become of this beautiful picture of a once and future Queen.
This knee-length portrait of the young Elizabeth was most likely painted in around 1546 for her
father, Henry VIII. Though some earlier commentators thought that it was created
by Hans Holbein (who died in 1543), in fact the timing and the style of it tell us that
the artist was probably the Dutch painter, William Scrots, who Henry had hired in 1545.
It was created using oils on a wooden panel and measures 108.5cm by 81.8.
Stylistically, it matches this image of Elizabeth’s younger half-brother, Edward VI
and the Royal Collection Trust, which now cares for the paintings, states that the same
tree probably supplied the wood for both and that they were created as a pair. This further
helps to narrow down the date range when they were likely made, as we can see Hunsdon House
in the background of Edward’s painting and we know he was there from May to July 1546.
He is also presented in his capacity as Prince of Wales and not King (that jewel around his neck
displays the Prince of Wales’s coronet and feathers) and so if Elizabeth’s
portrait was created at the same time, both must pre-date their father’s death in January 1547.
Elizabeth stands, with her body slightly turned to her right and stares straight out at the viewer.
She is wearing a crimson dress over a linen smock (if you look carefully you can just make out the
edges of this smock at her neckline), plus a matching French hood over a golden coif.
Her dress’s silhouette is in the classic mid-Tudor style,
with a square neck, huge hanging oversleeves and a circular skirt. The fabric, which may be silk,
has a pomegranate pattern woven into it and the little lines of gold paint on it are there to
suggest the presence of gold threads running through it. Her sleeves and underskirt are
made of the super-expensive and luxurious cloth of silver, tissued with gold. This type of fabric was
reserved by law for royalty only and its use makes a clear statement about Elizabeth’s parentage,
despite the fact that she had been officially illegitimate since the age of two, when her
father annulled his marriage to her mother, Anne Boleyn and had his onetime wife executed.
Elizabeth had in fact never recovered the title of Princess after this point,
and though she is commonly referred to as such at all stages before she became Queen,
in fact her official title between 1536 and 1558 was the Lady Elizabeth. By 1546 however,
Henry had placed his daughter (and her older sister, Mary) back into the line of succession
and perhaps this is why she felt confident enough to wear such an ostentatious dress.
The sleeves are also slashed with white and again, we can see her white linen smock showing through.
The red hair she inherited from Henry is on display,
parted in the middle and we can also see the dark brown eyes she shared with her mother.
Next we have her jewellery. The upper habiliment of the hood is trimmed with clusters of pearls
alternating with circular golden buttons set with what appear to be black gemstones. The
lower habiliment of the hood sports single pearls alternating with golden beads.
This sequence is replicated in Elizabeth’s necklace, which also bears a large golden pendant,
containing a black stone over a red one and with three pearls hanging beneath it. There
has been speculation that this necklace (minus the pendant), was inherited from her mother and that
it is the same strand of pearls seen in Anne’s famous B portrait, so named because in those
images the Queen wears a necklace with a B pendant on it. I have an entire video dedicated to the B
necklace which I’ll leave linked onscreen and below for you, but I will say here
that I think it’s impossible to prove that these pearls came from Anne and that Anne’s
didn’t alternate with golden beads either. If you like the B necklace, you can buy replicas of
it (with your own initial of course) and I’ve left links for some options in the description box too.
Back to Elizabeth though. Moving slightly lower down the painting,
we see a large, diamond-shaped brooch pinned to the front of her dress, just below the neckline,
with a black cross set into it, in either enamel or gemstones (it’s tough to be sure
from this image) and with a further three pearls suspended beneath it. Her sleeves are studded
with rectangular golden ouches set with black stones, similar to those on her hood and neckline
and she also wears at least 4 golden rings which are again set with black stones,
though not all her fingers are visible. Elizabeth had famously long fingers (as you can see from
this glove she once owned) and was proud of them and this painting enabled her to show them off.
Like her eyes, they seem to have been a trait inherited from her mother,
for when Anne’s bones were disinterred by the Victorians, they commented on her long,
delicate fingers. See my video on Digging up Anne Boleyn for more details. I’ll leave it linked on
screen and below for you as well. The final piece of Elizabeth’s jewellery is her jewelled girdle.
Like the decoration around her neckline and hood, the section which wraps around her waist
is formed of clusters of pearls alternating with black stones set in gold, before changing to gold
and what looks like it might be black and white enamel as it falls down the front of her dress.
In her hands, Elizabeth holds a book decorated with golden corners and with two pages marked by
a slip of paper and one of her fingers. There is another book open on a lectern behind her.
The Royal Collection Trust website suggests that these are the Old and New Testaments.
Framing her face and shoulders, we can see the curtains of her bed.
Given the reputation she held throughout her life for her intelligence and great learning
(she was multilingual for instance and used to do translations for fun)
this representation makes sense. She is showing her father how seriously she takes her studies
and that she is worthy of being the daughter of a man, who for all his faults, was no slouch when it
came to academic learning either. As for using her bedroom as a study, David Starkey says that
we shouldn’t read too much into this, saying in his book Elizabeth (linked below for you) that:
Peace and quiet were difficult to find in early Tudor households and bedrooms were made to
serve many purposes. Her father’s illustrated book of Psalms, for instance, shows him, too,
reading in his bedchamber, though he had studies, libraries and closets in plenty.
So now that we’ve examined the subtext of the painting, let’s look at its history
from the mid-1540s to modern times, but just before we do, if you’re enjoying this content,
please remember to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel with notifications
switched on so that YouTube lets you know when I upload. You can also follow me on Instagram,
which is linked in the description box. Ok, now back to the painting.
It first appears in royal inventories in 1547 at the start of the reign of Edward VI,
where it is described as ‘the picture of the Ladye Elizabeth her grace with a booke in
her hande her gowne like crymsen clothe’. It was then hanging in Whitehall Palace.
Interestingly, we have a letter Elizabeth wrote to her brother on 15 May in an unknown year
during Edward’s reign in which she refers to a painting of herself she had sent him.
This letter is not generally believed to be referring to the painting studied in this video,
however given that we can’t be certain about the exact year of creation for either the
painting or the letter, there’s a chance that it is. Either way, it provides a fascinating
glimpse into what the teenage Elizabeth thought of pictures of herself. She told her brother that:
My picture, I mean, in which if the inward good mind toward your Grace might as well be
declared as the outward face and countenance shall be seen, I would not have tarried the
commandment but prevent it, nor have been the last to grant but the first to offer it. For the face,
I grant, I might well blush to offer, but the mind I shall never be ashamed to present.
For though from the grace of the picture the colours may fade by time, may give you weather,
may be spotted by chance; yet the other nor time with her swift wings shall overtake, nor the
misty clouds with their lowerings may darken, nor chance with her slippery foot may overthrow. … And
further I shall most humbly beseech your Majesty that when you shall look on my picture,
you will vouchsafe to think that as you have but the outward shadow of the body before you,
so my inward mind wisheth that the body itself were oftener in your presence.
Both modest and confident, Elizabeth is saying that she might not be a great beauty,
but she knows her worth when it comes to her intelligence
and that will never fade in the way the paint on a picture might.
The red dress picture ultimately came back into Elizabeth’s possession when she became Queen
and we catch a glimpse of it late in her reign, when it was spotted in 1598 by a man named Paul
Hentzner, still hanging at Whitehall Palace. He described it as quote ‘queen Elizabeth at
16 years old’, which is slightly older than she actually was when this painting was done, but as
I’ve said before, ages in these old portraits can be very hard to judge. There’s also a possibility
that Hentzner was looking at a different picture, if we accept that Elizabeth sent another one of
herself to Edward at some stage during his reign, but given that we don’t hear mention of multiple,
solo portraits of the young Elizabeth, I think this was the only one remaining in royal hands.
Elizabeth died in 1603 and her distant cousin, James VI of Scotland, inherited the English throne
and her possessions along with it, including the portrait of her as a teenager. In 1613,
it was apparently spotted at Whitehall by the visiting Duke of Saxe-Weimar,
who called it ‘Queen Elizabeth, as she was when young’. Again, it would be nice to have
a little bit more information to go on here, just to be sure that it’s the same painting,
but given its location and the limited number of known pictures of her before she was Queen,
he was most likely looking at the red dress portrait.
James died in 1625, after which his son became King Charles I. Charles built up an incredible
art collection during his life and in 1639, his curator, the Dutchman Abraham Van der Doort,
compiled a catalogue of the royal pictures at Whitehall in which we get a clear reference to
this painting (which to this day bears Charles’s CR monogram on its back in reference to the period
during which he owned it). At that time it was hanging on the wall of Palace’s Privy Gallery
and Van der Doort, having misidentified it as a Holbein, described it as:
The picture of Queen Elizabeth when she was young, to the waist, in a red habit,
holding a blue book in both her hands, and another book lying upon the table.
In a gilded frame, painted on board. 5 ft x 4ft.
There are a couple of things which are interesting about this description. First, take a look at the
book Elizabeth is holding. It doesn’t look blue to me, which makes me suspect that the colours of the
paint have altered over time. Second, the painting is described as ‘to the waist’, when it is clearly
about three quarter length and Elizabeth is even holding the book below her waistline.
Given that this is so obviously the same picture we see nowadays, I think Van Der Doort is just
using the phrase ‘to the waist’ quite loosely, to describe an image in which Elizabeth’s lower
legs are missing. I do wish he’d been a bit more precise though. The dimensions given
of 5 by 4 feet don’t match the modern measurements either (which I gave in cm earlier, but which are
3.5 by 2.6 feet), however this might be accounted for by Van Der Doort including the frame in his
calculations. The only other explanation would be that the painting has been cut down at some
stage after he saw it. I think this is unlikely however, because if it had been larger in 1639,
it would have included Elizabeth’s feet and Van Der Doort wouldn’t have said it was ‘to
the waist’. There would also likely be some evidence of the alternation,
or a paper trail explaining what had happened. Its supposed twin, the portrait of Edward VI,
was extended for instance (and later cut back down) and those facts are well known.
We get another reference to the painting a decade or so after Van der Doort’s description,
thanks to the disastrous end to Charles’ reign. This came in January 1649 when he was executed
(also at Whitehall), after having been deposed by the Parliamentarians
under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell. His possessions were inventoried and sold off,
including the painting of Elizabeth. In this inventory, it is described as ‘Princess Elizabeth,
afterwards Elizabeth I’ and we are told that it was ‘in the custody of Mr Henry Browne,
8 September 1649: Privy Lodgings and Privy Gallery, Whitehall’. Though the description
is brief, there is no reason to doubt that this is the same picture Van der Doort saw in the
Privy Gallery a decade earlier. It was sold on 23 October 1651 to someone called ‘Jackson’ for £10.
Where the painting went for the next few years we don’t know,
but after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when Charles I’s son,
Charles II, took the throne, it quickly returned to royal hands, for we have a
reference to it being back at Whitehall in the 2nd Privy Room in a 1666 inventory.
How it made it out of Whitehall Palace is unknown,
but that Palace burnt down in 1698 and unlike so many other famous works of art lost at that time,
the painting didn’t go up in flames with it, so perhaps it had been moved before that, or
was successfully rescued from the building before the fire reached it. Either way, at some stage it
migrated to Windsor Castle, where we get a literal look at it in 1819, in a picture of the King’s Old
State Bedchamber published in a book looking at royal residences. You can see it here on the wall.
At Windsor Castle it has stayed. You aren’t allowed to film inside the building,
but it is now in the Queen’s Drawing Room, next to pictures of Elizabeth’s
siblings and father and other royals. You can see it there if you visit.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this history of one of Elizabeth’s earliest portraits. I’d like to take
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To learn more about Elizabeth, see my Tudor monarchs series which has five videos dedicated
to her life, or if art history is your thing, try one of these other options. Let me know in
the comments below what your favourite picture of Elizabeth I is and until next time, keep leaning.